is bird flu dangerous

[cails]

Does anybody heard about Bird Flu? Now a days Bird Flu is diseases which very fast increase in Indonesia country. Mostly human are dying from Bird Flu/Avian flu. so therefore I am very thoughtful, anyone tell What Symptoms of Bird Flu.?

[keith]

Originally Posted by cails

............ anyone tell What Symptoms of Bird Flu.?

just like normal flu, except you die.

[lauralitz]

You could look at the CDC's web site, they have an informations section on Avian Flu.
http://www.cdc.gov/
LL

[silver2e]

You might also want to check the World Health Organization site--it is in many languages.

http://www.who.int/csr/disease/avian.../en/index.html

and country specific information for Indonesia is at
http://www.who.int/csr/don/archive/country/idn/en/

[Jvanhousen]

Originally Posted by cails

What Symptoms of Bird Flu.?

#1: An uncontrolable urge to post off topic queries to discussion boards.

[MyrddinsPrecint]

if you were to catch bird flu, yes, it would be dangerous.

for right now, it's not a major worldwide epidemic.....

SARS was very dangerous. but while it killed a bunch of people.... it wasn't exactly wiping out large populations.

the bird flu will do some damage. and it may stay there.

or it might kill us all.

it's a toss up.

this thing could either fizzle out like SARS seems to have done.......

or it could kill up to a third of the human population, destroy the world economy, and other fun things....

and if the bird flu doesn't do serious population damage, something else will come around that will, in our lifetime, and we're not really ready for it.

the human race is somewhat overdue for a major life-destoying plague epidemic.

people were scared it was going to be Ebola, but it seems more likly it'll be a flu-type virus out of Asia than an hiv/ebola-type virus out of Africa, just because of how easily the Flu spreads..........


not to be alarmist or anything.

[whtouche]

Originally Posted by MyrddinsPrecint

SARS was very dangerous. but while it killed a bunch of people.... it wasn't exactly wiping out large populations.

Wasn't the survival rate for SARS something like 80 or 90%?
I might be mistaken and I know there were wide variances, but I think people with SARS had a pretty good shot at making it.

[Mo]

The Bird Flu is great for press conferences.

"Mr. President, did you lie to the American Public about weapons of mass destruction to get us in a war in Iraq??"

GWB "Bird flu, we gotta worry about bird flu.Now that is a weapon of mass destruction. I need forty million billion dollars to spend at my discretion or all Americans will DIE!!!"


It is also true that there are a lot of meets in Asia. The junior and cadet World Champs are in Korea. There is a meet for WS in Viet Nam.

Although it is a concern I won't tremble in fright.
Momster

[D+F+P=Hadouken!]

I feel sorry for the WS fencers that have to go to vietnam. Thats a bad place to have a WC. Go and have a WC in Lebanon or something.

[RebelFencer]

Originally Posted by Mo

The Bird Flu is great for press conferences.

"Mr. President, did you lie to the American Public about weapons of mass destruction to get us in a war in Iraq??"

GWB "Bird flu, we gotta worry about bird flu.Now that is a weapon of mass destruction. I need forty million billion dollars to spend at my discretion or all Americans will DIE!!!"

You are awesome.

[Zilverzmurfen]

Originally Posted by cails

Mostly human are dying from Bird Flu/Avian flu. so therefore I am very thoughtful, anyone tell What Symptoms of Bird Flu.?

Do you feel an urge to flap your arms a lot?
Do you have a runny beak...err...nose?
Do you prepare your oatmeal out of hirs seeds?

If you answer 'yes' to any or all of the questions above you should be very worried...


On a more serious note, media reported a lot about the 'Bird Flu' last year when it broke out and rapidly spread. It hasn't reached my parts of the world yet so I'm not particularly worried about catching it. (And my beak feels fine! )

[Pauli]

Originally Posted by Zilverzmurfen

(And my beak feels fine! )

Really?
Looked in the mirror recently?

Originally Posted by Jvanhousen

#1: An uncontrolable urge to post off topic queries to discussion boards.

Funny, then why does it especially break out in countries who surely do not shine because of their amount of internet cafés or amount of private internet stations.... (Asia, China.......China possibly isn't even allowed to access f.net....)

Originally Posted by D+F+P=Hadouken!

Go and have a WC in Lebanon or something.

Yep, sure sounds safer to me.....

[LUDICROUS]

Govt thinks bird flu could kill about 30,000 people here.

Thats a few. The government also plans to simply lock the prisons and board up the gates and let the flu run its course inside them...


Its true.

[Gav]

"Bird flu" has all the hallmarks of a typical health scare. It's hyped beyond its current threat. It is true that people who have caught bird flu have died however those that have caught the disease have worked closely with infected animals. It is also true that some people are worried that that bird flu may evolve into something more contagious and therefore more dangerous. At present unless you are going to be working closely with birds, or other people who do, then you have nothing to be worried/frightened/terrified of.

Do not buy the hype.

I am not advocating complacency. I would much rather that the governments of th world got on with the job of monitoring the disease than trying to scare their populations with tales of woe. Please compare the death and infection rates of bird flu with malaria, sleeping sickness, HIV and other diseases endemic to various parts of the world. You are far more likely to be infected with HIV [for example] after an enjoyable, yet stupidly unprepared, nightout than you are of catching Bird Flu.

And I assume we are talking about H5n1 - a disease which is currently finding it very difficult to get a toehold in the human population.

[Tazz]

Omg.. this is so dumb poster number one and poster number 15 is probably the same person trying to advertise his/her drugs.

[MyrddinsPrecint]

Originally Posted by whtouche

Wasn't the survival rate for SARS something like 80 or 90%?
I might be mistaken and I know there were wide variances, but I think people with SARS had a pretty good shot at making it.

i really don't remember what the survival rate was, but the problem is the same with ANY new flu-like bug....

......SARS, bird flu, ebola (i think?), HIV (some people think) and others were all viruses that came first from animals and then humans caught them..... but none of them turned out to be THAT contagious. for all the damage HIV has done, if you're walking down the street (assuming you don't step on a dirty needle that goes through your shoe), you're not getting HIV. if sars or ebola were going to kill major populations, it probably would have already happened. ebola usually kills too fast to infect more than just a remote village (from what i remember from the Hot Zone six years ago). bird flu might go major.....


the problem, to address your original question, is that there was a lot of initial attention to SARS, so most of the victims were getting top-of-the-line medical treatment. or, at least medical treatment. when it comes to flu and flu-like diseases... most healthy adults will be fine. but young children and the elderly will die, but they'll also pass it on. and when it's transmitted enough times, there will usually be some mutation, and usually that mutation makes the virus more deadly, and more contagious.

what i don't know is why bird flu and SARS were picked as the particular flu-like bugs to be scared of.... there are a LOT of flu strains in the world at any particular moment, and the flu vaccines in the US change every winter based on what was popular in Asia in the last heavy flu season. if know just enough about this all to know that i can justifyably be very very scared, so i try to stay away from the information as much as i can. A good friend of mine is a Biology major with a minor in Medieval Studies, and has done a lot of coursework and labwork in studying diseases and such, and she checks the CDC and WHO websites on a daily basis.... and she's not a paranoid person.

Originally Posted by Tazz

Omg.. this is so dumb poster number one and poster number 15 is probably the same person trying to advertise his/her drugs.

i agree entirely. that doesn't change the fact that having Tamiflu might actually save your life if you were in a high risk group for a deadly version of the flu. ......... but it's supposed to be available by prescription only, for a number of reasons. part of it is that it will do more harm than good to certain groups, and partially because if there's a major flu pandemic in the world, there are a number of morality questions in rich people hiding in their mansions taking it as a preventative while not-as-rich people die because they couldn't get any off the black market........

[Inquartata]

The mortality rate of H5N1 has not yet been properly determined, because there have been two few cases to make for statistical validity. Of the first handful of cases, I think it was around 80% died. Now there have been more, and the survival rate was higher, so average mortality has fallen off to around 60%. It may go back up, it may go back down.

Don't eat raw poultry or duck blood soup, and avoid cockfighting events. ( And Mike Tyson ). You should be fine, as Gav said. At least until it mutates to a human-infectious variety, which most influenza viruses seem to do eventually.

[Larrison]

Originally Posted by MyrddinsPrecint

if you were to catch bird flu, yes, it would be dangerous.

for right now, it's not a major worldwide epidemic.....

Just as a note, it *is* a major worldwide epidemic -- in birds. The sign that it has spread to a nation's bird population is when flocks of domestic birds start dying. It's being spread through migratory wildfowl. It's probably killed tens of millions of birds at this point (not including human culling of diseased populations).

However, today the odds of any human catching the virus are very very low -- unless you have direct contact, flesh-to-flesh, with diseased birds, or consume uncooked bird meat, blood or the like.

That's good news -- bad for birds, but good for humans.

But what folks are concerned with is that the strain of flu here (H5N5) is very smilar to the "Spanish Flu" (H1N1) which killed 50-100 Million people in 1918-1919. The mortality rate for the Spanish flu was pretty high -- up to 90% in some genetic populations. All of the estimates you're seeing for potential deaths come from extrapolation of having the Spanish flu strike today's populations. As a point of comparison, AIDS killed around 25 million people in its first 25 years, whereas the Spainish Flu killed around that many in 25 weeks starting in September 1918. This was a major pandemic.

So *if* the strain were to mutate to something that could pass from human-to-human, then it is very much to be concerned with. And considering the potential consequences, its something folks are starting to worry about.

The best estimates I've seen indicate that you need a couple of mutations to the current H1N5 strain before it really gets dangerous -- including the ability to do human-to-human transmission. The flu virus is very prone to mutation, and historically flu virus strains mutate very fast -- sometimes multiple times in a year. Which is why everyone is watching the human cases that occur, watching *very* closely to see if there is human-to-human transmission. So far it hasn't been seen...

The good news in this is that since the bird flu has been sequenced, you can start producing a vaccine that has very good odds of being effective against it if it starts to mutate for human-to-human transmission. It takes 6-9 months to turn out a vaccine, and countries are starting to produce the vaccine although it will take some time to produce 10's of millions of doses. Of course, depending upon the mutation, the vaccine may not be 100% effective, but it will probably be enough to contain a major pandemic (vaccines don't have to be 100% effective to do that.. just enough to break the chain of transmission-growth-transmission); if there is enough vaccine on hand.

Bottom line -- right now, unless you play with live birds, or consume uncooked bird meat, bird flu is not a major health risk to humans. Could it become one in the future? yes.... And is it possible, that the genetic mutations that would cause it to spread to humans will not happen? Yes.. But it is also possible that it might, with the potential consequence of substantial loss of life -- so folks are at least trying to be prepared.

[Zelda]

Originally Posted by D+F+P=Hadouken!

I feel sorry for the WS fencers that have to go to vietnam. Thats a bad place to have a WC. Go and have a WC in Lebanon or something.

Whats wrong with Vietnam? Its a gorgeous country.

[latenight]

Originally Posted by Zelda

Whats wrong with Vietnam? Its a gorgeous country.

And I've known some gorgeous Vietnamese ladies.......